Reading Notes by Lisa Blasch

Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light

I'll begin this overview by briefly retelling one particular event which seems to me to capture a key aspect of Jacques Lusseyran's narrative and thus provide a basic context for discussing more specific aspects of the book. Early in his relationship with Jean, Lusseyran advised him of the importance of moving beyond the inner life and fully engaging the outer. Although he was receptive to his friend's counsel, Jean's disposition created a kind of insolubility which he found difficult to overcome. Lusseyran explains that the journey to connect one's own life to the richness of the outerworld begins when we shed the burdensome task of separating the world into that which is ours, and that which is not. He says to him: "There is only one world. Things outside exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in." Neither world is fully real until it is interpenetrated by the other.

The faculty of seeing is only one way in which we have access to the world around us. From our limited standpoint, we divide it in half &endash; into the inner and the outer worlds &endash; and then discover great difficulties associated with identifying ourselves too closely with one side or the other. Fixating our attention on appearances and externalities, we find that the inner life becomes a mystery. Being absorbed with the inner life, however, produces isolation and suffering. Either option is dangerous, because these attitudes are the source of shallow ignorance, the vulgarity of violence and the hopelessness of despair.

Lusseyran's childhood blindness opened his senses in a way which revealed the interdependence of everything. Light is a metaphor for the world's substantial unity. With the loss of his sight, his remaining senses became more acute and worked in tandem to re-establish access to the world. He begins to see without the use of his eyes through a radical openness to external objects. By allowing objects to come toward him on their own and proceeding to feel them from a distance, he soon learns to distinguish their qualities from one another. By his new light he perceives one substance from which everything is made and in which everything participates.

Most importantly, this substance is moral as well as physical. The infinite potential of human relationships illustrates this. Lusseyran describes humanity as one flesh with the same desires and limitations, therefore we learn about ourselves and the world by adopting the same radical comportment to people as he takes to the physical world. Because our individual lives are already bound together in this way, our happiness and survival depends upon creating and strengthening interdependence rather than destroying it. Love and friendship are best of all, then, because they make growth and flourishing very real and joyous prospects.

Understanding human relations in this way translates into a code of social and political virtues. Lusseyran describes his education as a study of harmonizing the present with the past to form a coherent wholeness. The subjects of philosophy, literature and history brought to bear on one another led him to the realization that freedom is an essential right of all humanity. This is not merely political freedom or the right to do what one wants. Instead it is something more meaningful, a basic capacity to be self-determining in accordance with our situation. To have this requires allowing others to have it as well. This illuminates the immorality of war. While Lusseyran's dramatic heroes avoided war by reasoning with one another, using "persuasion, calculated with passion but to reach reconciliation," there are other people who turn eternal virtues on their head by doing violence to others in the name of honor and duty. To love war &endash; even the idea of it - must be on Lusseyran's terms one of the worst moral conditions imaginable, a kind of ‘outer darkness' based on the same conceptual blindness he counsels Jean against. All of this explains the ethics of the resistance as a political movement. We can't always stop wars through reasoned argumentation, because warmongers either don't understand or are incapable of caring about the need to universalize human freedom. Even working to resist the global expansion of a political regime brings the threat of brutality and violence, however we affirm the essential "moral structure" of the universe when we display the courage to defend humanity and endure violence by loving and aiding one another. Yet, Lusseyran's Buchenwald experiences demonstrate his belief that not even the proximity of death can negate the emancipatory potential of devoting oneself to these things.